The headline is irresistible. Turkey is preparing a legal framework to accelerate the dissolution of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The imprisoned founder of the PKK has urged abandonment of armed struggle, and the party has announced its intention to disarm and disband. The resulting process is portrayed as a major step towards resolution of one of the longest conflicts in the Middle East. It represents a story that is clean, solemn, and rich in promise of legacy.
But peace processes do not begin where the cameras suggest. Instead, they originate in the tedious and difficult details of legal provisions, records of imprisonment, arrangements for borders, guarantees for intelligence operations, compromises among parliamentarians and calculations of men who have spent lifetimes distrusting one another. The real issue is not merely whether the PKK can proclaim the end of its armed struggle. It is whether Turkey can create a legal, political and regional system in which such a declaration becomes irreversible.
For more than four decades, conflict with the PKK has profoundly influenced Turkish politics, devastated the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, stimulated the growth of the Kurdish movement in Syria and strongly shaped the entire Kurdish experience. It has resulted in military cemeteries, sections of prisons, abandoned villages, restrictions on the use of language, disruption of families and creation of conflicting national memories. Any attempt to eliminate this history with a speech from İmrali, a parliamentary bill passed in Ankara or with a symbolic cessation of hostilities will fail. The romantic vision of peace assumes that armed conflict ends with the withdrawal of weapons. However, violence frequently continues in the forms of legal provisions, memories of the past, feelings of fear and continuing suspicions of one another.
That is why the legal regime currently under discussion is of such importance. Disarmament is not merely a moral or political enterprise, but also a practical one. The law will have to determine the fate of surrendering militants, of prisoners and of those released from prison. It will also have to define who may return from exile and whether ex-combatants may integrate themselves as civilians without immediately becoming victims of prosecution. Finally, it will have to establish boundaries that Turkey has frequently ignored: between armed activity, political activism and Kurdish cultural expression. In the absence of such clarity, disarmament will appear more as a process of surrender and punishment than of peaceful resolution. With such clarity, it may become a process of transition.
This represents the major difficulty. The government seeks elimination of the PKK as an armed force, but most Kurds perceive the situation as inseparable from the broader problem of Kurdish identity. This includes rights to the use of the Kurdish language, to local democratic forms of government, to the release of political prisoners, to recognition of Kurdish culture, to freedom of the press and finally to the development of normal legal forms of political activity. The government has long described the conflict in terms of terrorism, preservation of national sovereignty and maintenance of national security. In this context, elimination of the PKK would reflect ultimate defeat, exhaustion or complete control of an armed insurgency that has existed since the 1980s. It would provide additional support for the priority objective of complete disappearance of weapons, disintegration of military structures and elimination of the capacity of armed Kurdish forces to influence the policies of the government.
Many Kurds will have an even less comfortable question: Once the weapons are gone, will Kurdish politics still be perceived as a security threat? The PKK arose in an environment of denial of Kurdish identity, restriction of the Kurdish language and treatment of political demands as threats to the integrity of the republic. Even those Kurds who do not support the PKK will continue to see the conflict as based on more than just military struggle: on refusal of the Turkish state to recognise Kurdish rights to collective self-determination.
If the process eliminates the PKK but maintains a security-based perception of Kurdish politics, most will conclude that the nature of the conflict has changed, but it is essential characteristics remain.
The role of Öcalan illustrates the inherent contradictions of the entire process. For many years, he has been imprisoned as the founder of the PKK and as a symbol of a movement against which the Turkish state has waged an unrelenting struggle. However, he is now the individual whose importance for the termination of the armed struggle is greater than for any other figure. He remains the only Kurdish leader who possesses sufficient symbolic authority to compel the PKK to cease hostilities and to achieve compliance. Efforts to eliminate his influence over many years now constitute the basis for the peace process and will continue to do so.
The PKK is not simply an organisation with a logo, command structure and offices to close. It is an armed movement developed over decades of ideology, discipline, sacrifice, martyrs, factions and regional networks. Even with acceptance of dissolution, implementation will not be easy. Some cadres will obey; others will hesitate. Commanders outside Turkey will distrust Ankara, younger militants will reject a political transition perceived as degrading, and militants in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan will have no confidence that surrender ensures safety.
Disbandment of the PKK will not eliminate its extensive networks in Iran, Syria and Europe. Peace processes will generate splinters, and commitment to armed struggle will be perceived as betrayal. Veterans of war will find civilian politics unacceptable, degrading or impossible. Those who distrust the Turkish state will refuse to surrender without guarantees. Dissolution of the armed struggle is one thing; complete disbandment of an armed movement operating in several countries is another.
The result will not only be failure of the entire process, but also fragmentation of the movement without elimination of conditions that previously supported armed struggle. Erdoğan’s calculations are equally complex. He may regard the process as an opportunity to achieve his political legacy, reduce the burden of military operations, alter the course of Kurdish politics and strengthen the regional influence of Ankara. Elimination of the PKK’s armed struggle would represent a major political achievement for any Turkish leader, reduce one of the major justifications for military operations against Iraq and Syria, and provide an opportunity to present himself as the leader who ended a conflict that had been unsuccessful in all previous attempts.
But Erdogan is not working in a vacuum. He must accommodate nationalist opinion, the military-security establishment, his own party, suspicion of his enemies and of the Nationalist Movement Party. In that process, he has achieved an unexpectedly important opening for political space. Any concession is interpreted as weakness, any release of prisoners as betrayal, and any reform of Kurdish language or local forms of government as the first steps towards separatism. As a result, the process must proceed along a very narrow path: sufficient to convince Kurds that it is not another empty promise, but not so great as to provoke panic among Turkish nationalists. Insufficient reform leads to collapse of Kurdish trust; excessive and rapid reform increases the likelihood that resistance to the process by Turkish nationalists will become stronger even before the process is firmly established. Syria further aggravates the difficulties of the balancing act.
The problem of Turkey and the PKK no longer exists solely within Turkey. Rojava has converted the Kurdish conflict from an internal revolutionary struggle to a regional problem of security. The forces of the Syrian Democratic Army and the YPG are regarded as extensions of the PKK by Turkey and as manifestations of the autonomy of a Kurdish armed force. The forces claim to represent an independent Syrian military effort with its own institutions, with its own war against ISIS and with its own relations to other countries. Cooperation with these forces has been achieved by the United States, and efforts to restore central authority are being supported by the Syrian government. Finally, there is no intention of sacrificing Rojava as a means of achieving a settlement between Turkey and the PKK.
The peace process may start in Turkey but cannot escape Syria. If Ankara insists that the PKK disband and simultaneously dismantles Kurdish military structures in Syria, many Kurds will perceive the process as a continuation of efforts to reduce Kurdish power throughout the region. By contrast, if some form of accommodation enables Kurdish forces to participate in state structures and retain rights to political and cultural autonomy, Ankara will claim that armed Kurdish autonomy is no longer necessary. Neither outcome is certain, but the situation with Syria could either stabilise or destroy Kurdish confidence in the peace process.
Iraqi Kurdistan is an equally unavoidable component of the overall situation. The long-term presence of PKK forces in the mountains of the Kurdish Regional Government has placed the latter in an impossible position for many years. Military operations by Turkey have devastated border areas, displaced rural populations and increased pressure on Erbil. The Kurdish Regional Government seeks stability, expansion of trade and recognition of its international legitimacy. At the same time, it must avoid being perceived by Kurdish populations as merely fulfilling Ankara’s requirements for security.
A successful disarmament process would reduce Turkish pressure on the Kurdish Regional Government, permit recovery of some border areas and reinforce the position of Erbil as the centre of legal Kurdish political activity. Failure, however, would increase instability. Continued refusal of PKK factions to withdraw from Qandil, continued military operations regardless of disbandment, and continued perception of complicity with the weakening of another Kurdish political movement would leave Erbil caught between pressures of Turkey and of Kurdish nationalism. For these reasons, the process cannot be understood solely in terms of relations between Ankara and the PKK. Rather, it involves events at Imrali, Qandil, Diyarbakir, Erbil, Qamishli, Damascus and Washington.
Each location represents a source of pressure and has the potential to either sustain or disrupt the process. The emotional aspects of these experiences are as important as their geopolitical implications. For Kurds, the entire experience reflects memories of repression, destruction of villages, prohibition of the use of the Kurdish language, arrest of political activists, failure of negotiations, and the perception that Kurdish demands will be tolerated only to the extent that they are harmless. For Turks, it represents recollections of killed soldiers, of civilian casualties, of bombing attacks and of fears of national disintegration and of decades of messages equating Kurdish militancy with a threat to the survival of the Turkish state. Peace will not be achieved by negotiations between abstract communities designated as “Turks” or “Kurds.” Rather, it must be achieved by experiences of families that buried soldiers, lost homes, spent decades in prison, or received messages over most of their lives that make it hazardous simply to have confidence.
A successful peace process cannot erase memories but must create a political environment capable of surviving them. This will require much more than a statement by the PKK. It will require a credible legal system, a graduated process of disarming, clear policies regarding prisoners and returnees, protection for legal Kurdish political activity, reduced military escalation, coordination with Iraq and the KRG, and a manageable situation with respect to Syria.
In addition, both sides must convince populations conditioned for decades to distrust one another that the process is worth supporting. The greatest risk is that Ankara will regard disarming as the end of the Kurdish problem, whereas Kurds will see it as the beginning of broader opportunities for political freedom. If expectations collide, optimism will rapidly be replaced by disillusionment.
Consequently, the most difficult tasks will occur after the cessation of hostilities. The PKK will be able to declare an end to its armed struggle. The Turkish government will be able to prepare the legal basis for that event.
The leader of the PKK will be able to provide directions of a magnitude unavailable to other Kurdish leaders. But ultimately, the most difficult question remains: Can Turkey accept political forms of behaviour that are no longer associated with armed conflict, and can the Kurdish movement accept political conditions in the absence of weapons? Until that problem is resolved, the process of achieving peace will continue to be a historically important, but fragile and incomplete experience.
